


Wind a Bandage Round My Wrist (To Keep Me Safe)

by The_Secret_Life_Of_Tea



Series: MH [1]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: ADHD, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Canon Autistic Character, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, OCD, Psychosis, Queerplatonic Relationships, Self-Harm, Smoking, neurodivergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:08:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23707375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Secret_Life_Of_Tea/pseuds/The_Secret_Life_Of_Tea
Summary: Everybody lives AU—The Operator is not real, and is a shared psychotic break between Brian and Tim.  Jay, Tim, and Brian are living together in the aftermath of Tim and Jay’s inpatient hospitalization.
Relationships: Jay Merrick & Brian Thomas, Jay Merrick/Timothy "Tim" Wright
Series: MH [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707394
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	Wind a Bandage Round My Wrist (To Keep Me Safe)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Princex-n](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Princex-n).



> This is far darker than my usual fare, but I am special interesting about Marble Hornets a lot right now! Jay has severe untreated OCD, Tim is autistic, and Brian has ADHD. They are in a queerplatonic relationship, hence why this is marked gen.

Tim is a taut wire, a ragged skein of yarn, the kind you’d find in a dollar bin at the craft shop, one buried below all the others. Or else he is a length of barbed wire, the kind that catches your flesh and sinks its teeth in, the kind that burrows under your skin until you pull it free, the kind that rusts and is rusted.

He has always been held together by sheer willpower and nervous energy. 

It’s about two in the morning, or it was by his last glance at the red-raw numbers of the digital clock, so. Could be two-thirty, could be three, could be six. Who knows. He’s got a cigarette in his fingers but he’s more contemplating the ash that falls to his feet when he taps it then actually smoking it. The ember-end captures his attention like nothing else does. 

It’s maybe two in the morning, and he’s wired. His head is a jumbled junk drawer on the best of days, but when his senses go like—like this, his pulse pounding like a runner’s sneakers on pavement, harsh and staccato, he knows a meltdown is inevitable. 

Better to hunker down and get through it.

Bad Days like this entail Jay. Tim always jokes that Jay is his emotional support person—his calm demeanor always playing off Tim’s incessant worrying—but Jay is asleep. Jay is asleep and nothing feels right, the skin of his wrists bulges with need, the need to—to claw and rip and reap that sediment settled in his veins. He doesn’t know what to do when his head is going at this fast a clip. Before he knows it, his breathing’s gone erratic. He can’t get enough air in his lungs, and he turns the cherry of his cigarette to his wrist—

“Hey. Hey, Tim, no,” Jay says from behind him. Tim shivers all over. When did he let his guard down enough that Jay could just walk up behind him like that?

Tim tries to make a noise approximating speech, but can only let out a snarling groan. Jay doesn’t back off though. They have an agreement: when Tim gets out of control like this, when he is helpless to the waves of pain and too much and overwhelm, then Jay helps him. 

Tim isn’t allowed to hurt himself, not since Jay found him curled up in the bathtub, mindlessly tracing the edge of a pair of scissors over the curve of his wrists, over and over. Jay took the scissors away. Somehow, Tim can never find out his hiding place, but Brian can, and sometimes Brian just pulls scissors or a knife out of his pocket, defiantly waving it in Jay’s face until Jay plucks it out of his grip.Tim doesn’t want to be nonverbal right now, but he is most days. Brian talks more than enough for the both of them in his hyperactive way. Dully, Tim wonders where Brian is right now. Probably asleep, or else roaming. The only rule is that he needs to get at least four hours of sleep per day. 

Jay calls the shots in this relationship, which is more than okay with Tim. He needs to give up some control to function. And Jay is neurodivergent too, so it doesn’t feel like some abled person just telling him he’s crazy and to obey the rules or else. Jay is endlessly kind with him.

Brian, though, resents Jay’s rules, is always finding loopholes. Once he stayed up for nearly seventy-two hours straight, and when Jay chewed him out, Brian shrugged and said, “You said I have to lay down for four hours a night. Not that I have to sleep.” 

Since then, the rule has been amended. 

Even with his rebellious nature, Brian often has more freedom than Tim. That’s okay in Tim’s book; he relies on the two of them to balance him out, help him. The word ‘disability’ makes his skin crawl, but lately he’s trying to challenge that. It’s okay to be disabled. It’s okay. Interdependence, not independence. 

Jay takes Tim’s hands in his. It’s not a restraining grasp, not like when things go blurred and white noise fills Tim’s ears and he cannot for the life of him hold back his urges any longer. No, this is a soft grip, something gentle, and Tim can feel himself already relaxing. 

He doesn’t look Jay in the eye. Eye contact is for wimps and neurotypicals. Jay doesn’t give half a shit, anyway. Lifting his hand to his chin, he signs, “Thank you.” Sign language is a lot easier than talking is for him.

Jay smiles, tapping his hand against his own thigh in a rhythmic pattern that Tim would know in his sleep. 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3, 10, 11. Numbers are a big thing for Jay, a compulsory comfort. “Twos are bad,” he’d explained, a shamed quirk of the lips on his face. “Threes are the best. I do eleven, which is one plus one and therefore the embodiment of two, to keep us safe.” 

From what, Tim doesn’t know. Themselves? The outside world?

He supposes, as Jay gives one of Tim’s knuckles a kiss, his chapped lips brushing over the fragile skin there, that it doesn’t really matter.


End file.
